We just need to break through our fear

95%OF OUR UNIVERSE IS UNKNOWN

By Dr. Surprise, who is in 10th grade and whose native languages are Ukrainian and Russian.

MAYBE you are afraid of something, but never stopped to ask why you are afraid. Some fears come from the feeling of not being sure you will be O.K. in the future, or we are afraid because of all the bad things we hear around us. But in most cases, fear is linked to the unknown. Unknown experiences or unknown feelings, things we can’t understand or explain, these scare us.

Now imagine our universe’s begining and end. It’s something almost impossible to understand because what made it happen is invisible. [invisible: something our eyes cannot see]. To understand our universe’s beginning and end you have to study “black matter”. [It is sometimes called “dark matter”.] But you cannot see it! No one can really say what it is, but I will try to explain the most popular theory.

What we see in our universe is only 5% of what is there! Almost 25% of the universe is black matter. Another force that repels [pushes away] gravity, called dark energy, is the other 70% of the universe.

Black matter does not contact [touch] or interact with the matter we see around us. That is why we can’t see it. Black matter makes energy. We know it’s there because of how it pushes away, or changes, the shape of galaxies. Scientists think black matter rests on gravity fields that control all our galaxies. It controls how other matter comes together to form galaxies, planets, stars, and even people! Scientists think that black matter and black energy caused the “Big Boom,” that made our universe and that now black matter and black energy is making our universe expand. Even more, if black matter collided with the matter we see, a huge explosion would happen and our universe would collapse.

Because black matter is invisible, we can’t explore it. But the unknown does not have to do harm. We just need to believe that we are able to find answers. We just need to try to explore the unknown. Only those people who break through their fear, explore new things. It is better to take risk sometimes, then to sit in a world of the unknown!